2000 toasts to found-object art

When it comes to garbage, we often don’t see the forest for the trees, throwing away perfectly usable materials for the sake of fashion rather than function.

Artist Katherine Gray decided to take one particular material found in abundance in every Goodwill, garage sale and garbage dump to create a piece that contains both a chance for historical reflection as well as contemplation of our modern buying habits.

As it states on the Corning Museum of Glass website, “Forest Glass is about creation and destruction, ecology, and historical glass. It refers to the history of glassmaking and its attendant environmental issues: trees—in fact, forests of them—were obliterated over the centuries so that their wood could be used as fuel for glass furnaces. In this work, Gray reconstructs some of these lost trees out of the material that destroyed them—in effect, recycling the trees with recycled glass.

Sure, we know those brown and green glasses went out of fashion circa 1978, but that only means they’re ready for a comeback, right?